I Wanna Be The Guy: Gaiden Absolutely Hates You

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I Wanna Be The Guy: Gaiden killed me with a fish before I started the first level. It killed me again when I tried to start the first level. It killed me again before I touched solid ground in the first level. It killed me again with a sudden burst of fire when I tried to hop over a barrel in the first level. It killed me again when I tried to walk under a platform in the first level. It killed me again when I finally managed to leap on top of that platform. It killed me again when I tried to leap over a barrel – with the same fish as the time before I started the first level. That goddamn fish. It killed me again when I finally made it past the fish, only to be crushed by a platform mere centimeters away. It killed me again when I tried to leap between the platform and the fish. It killed me again when I made it past that part and a purple army man shot me. Then I gave up forever.

I Wanna Be The Guy: Gaiden is, of course, a pseudo-sequel to comically difficult Internet sensation I Wanna Be The Guy. So basically, it’s a platformer that takes sprites from your most fondly remembered games of yore and then mercilessly – and you may not have seen this one coming – kills you with them. At any given moment, anything in the world can and will defy physics, logic, and any other forces that might keep the universe in balance for the sole purpose of doing you grievous bodily harm. My headline was not hyperbole: this game hates you.

For most, then, it’s a novelty. Joy comes not from success (because hahahahaha, you think that’s actually possible), but from giggling at the fact that something so absurdly unfair can even exist. I know of people who’ve devoted countless blood, sweat, and tear-stained hours to conquering this series’ gleefully masochistic gauntlet of trial-and-error, but they also eat hardware stores for breakfast, play barefoot hopscotch on rows of shattered glass, and use Bing instead of Google. Bing! They are clearly not altogether there in the head.

Also, a quick word of warning: Gaiden’s still pretty glitchy. The restart key (which will quickly become your best friend) stopped working entirely for me a couple times, so I had to reboot the whole game. Honestly, though, that’s pretty much in line with I Wanna Be The Guy’s general “thwart players at every conceivable turn” philosophy, so maybe it was… intentional?

I love the games. I hate their behaviour. Too much misogyny and insulting and the commentators often take sides. If you watch Day9 or Artosis, and then switch to MarlinPie, you go straight from in-depth sports commentary to school-yard fight. It’s embarrassing for the viewer.

On a positive note, Maximillian_dood (Miles923 on youtube) is essentially Day9 for fighting games, except he can also make movies. Really awesome.

TB is really bad in his videos. He misses a lot of obvious stuff, whether it be an onscreen item, solving a puzzle, or catching onto a game mechanic.

For example, he completely missed the rather visible glowing sniper rifle next to the bridge in Duke Nukem Forever, while complaining that the game didn’t give him a long range weapon to shoot the guys on the other side of the bridge. In some dwarf game, he made a point about lava being bad, then missed a lava warning for a while, then flubbed a panic response to deal with it. In one of the starfighter games, I believe he attacked his own ship. In the Sideways video, he didn’t grasp how his orientation affected how he interacted with stuff. The Dungeonland video seemingly had none of the players paying enough attention to figure out mechanics like the life system.

TB videos are pretty good for viewing gameplay and concerns, but they also tend to have headbanging moments where you just want to magically tell him through the screen what he’s missing.

(Edit: I should say that everyone has such moments where they miss the obvious. I’m not trying to pick on TB, and certainly not trying to say that I’ve never missed something obvious.)

TB’s WTF’s at least have the pretension to be more than regular let’s plays with commentary, and he is generally speaking better informed and actually has something to say about the games he plays… but sometimes he really is just messing about, getting views just because of his voice. Then again, for this game that really isn’t a problem.

“In some dwarf game, he made a point about lava being bad, then missed a lava warning for a while, then flubbed a panic response to deal with it.” Are you telling me I’ve been playing DF wrong this whole time!?

How do you define “good at games” though? Is it being able to get perfect scores on every level? Spotting every secret? Completing on hardest difficulty settings? What about being “good” at certain games and not others?

It seems to me that all you have to do to come across as being “good at games” is bitching about how lame the AI is, how easy inferno level is in Diablo, etc.

I’ve watched videos where TB breezes through a level of an FPS, whilst talking constantly, that I’ve had a hard time completing in one sitting. I’ve also seen him do puzzle-type games where I’ve yelled the solution at the screen, but then he’ll spot it and complain that he’s crap at puzzle games which is fair enough

Being good at a game is nothing subjective at all! In Tetris, you are good if you make a lot of lines. In Mario, you are good if you get to the exit quick and without dying. You can still have fun while being bad, but that’s not the point of “skill” at all.

Seriously, those young people nowadays.

And yes, TB is really bad. Note that skill falls on a bell-curve. I’d say he’s somewhere in the middle, which puts him below most other video-makers, but still above half his viewers.

This game sorta debuted in EVO 2012, when some fella with nick ‘Floe’ played evo version of this game on live stream (youtube link -> link to youtube.com). It was fun, especially because for that special occasion game had direct connection between developer and player, so developer could ‘help’ the player if he got into a troublesome situation by… sending a plane or Sonic to kill him, or do some other random stuff. It’s a fun watch.
But damn, that game is hard.

Floe’s playing of IWBTG (along with a fistful of other pseudo-sequels and knockoffs, most notably I Wanna Be the Boshy) has become something of a phenomenon within the fighting game community to the point where he is better known and loved for his struggles with the Guy than he is for playing fighting games. So much so that the developers of both IWBTG and Boshy have become personal acquaintances of his, have built in multiple references to him within the games, and will often assist him during his streams. If anybody is interested, the youtube user sonicboom510 regularly compiles videos of highlights from Floe’s streams: link to youtube.com

that would be me… i clicked a little too fast thru the install process of some other Software, and i got this crappy Bing bar on my Firefox, or was it Chrome?…. couldnt find a way to uninstall it at first (the first sign something dodgy is up), and so i probably left it a few months, untill i found a freeware non-microsoft uninstaller.

Depends on your mindset. I’m really enjoying it for the two separate things it provides: Hilarious moments of unexpected death, really tight challenging platforming sequences that are ‘fair’ by comparison.

So long as you are expecting to die unfairly and can laugh at it/yourself it’s immensely fun, though you’ll still get frustrated by the challenging platforming parts, but that’s a nice reward when you master them.

Plus the game is really breakable (by design) so there’s a ton of interesting shortcuts to find.

hey folks , anybody have any idea WTF is that cloud doing there … i came to the very end of first stage and suddenly stupid cloud kept appearing and tossing around barrels >.<
whole game became unplayable … not just for me , but for everyone … it keep spawning whenever you retry … here is link where you can see it :